I was at the kung fu school earlier this evening, and a guy came in that isn't a student. I started talking a little about classes and what-not, but he told me he was more looking for odd jobs. Fair enough, I gave him the number to call (I doubt my teacher's looking for anything, but you never know). Then he started asking about weapons, about how interested he is in swords especially (Ving Tsun has a form involving two shorter blades, but you have to train for a solid decade+ to get there). I said that wasn't really our focus, and that you had to train a long time to get to the weapon forms, and that our focus was generally on empty hands.

Then I was told that he lives by the code of the samurai, and that's why he was interested. I suggested he may want to look into kendo.

And I mean, fair enough ... I'm very much a big tent kind of person; we're all weird in our own ways. I do worry about the extent that this guy was looking for identity, though. We also get tourists every once in awhile, who will talk to you about martial arts that they've seen for an hour and a half, but have 0 interest in actually training anything. As I made the transition to teaching, my own teacher warned me not to get sucked in, meaning not to sacrifice an hour of my own training time on someone who isn't really interested in actually doing anything.

The world of martial arts is a very strange place sometimes.